Exploring Eastside with mobile technologies

Blog Archive

Luckily it's rubbish so the analysis is progressing. Slight holdup
getting transcripts done and okayed by interviewees, but we should
have a full set of spatialised interview data to play with in about
a month... watch this space...

So, first off, an apology that the blog was down for most of July.
Apparently we have a bandwidth problem which we can resolve by
spending more money. Hmm. Well, I tried moving the blog over to
Blogger (Google's free blogging service) but apparently there's some
incompatibility that stops us from easily importing the blog as an
RSS feed (or something). Sigh.

While we were offline, we got the results of the Arts Council bid
back. Unsuccessful, apparently because they weren't convinced by
the budgeting. Ho hum. So we have to go to Plan B and have a rather
smaller 'Lab' than would have otherwise been the case. This isn't
disastrous as the main intention that James and I have always had is
in giving people an opportunity to come and see some of what we've
done with the interviews etc., rather than just relying on the
website. It would have been nice to do something a bit more
dramatic, but so it goes.

Dan is in Beruit at the
moment, struggling with a semi-functional camera, but when he gets
back we'll start producing some nice poster-sized prints of the
photos he's been taking of our interviewees. I have some of the
contact sheets pinned up above my desk and they look great.

In the meantime James has been travelling Europe on various errands
while I've been stuck in the office writing. I've sent off an
article to an academic journal called
Environment and Planning B
which is all about urban design and computing stuff. Essentially I
was writing about some of the stuff we've been doing with Google
Maps - we'll see if the guys who review these articles like it as
much as I did. Certainly it's about the fastest thing I've ever
written for proper publication - from first opening a document in MS
Word to sending it off in less than 16 days. I've also been
thinking about quite what we might do for a follow-up project in
Kidderminster and my office whiteboard is full of diagrams of
workflows and so forth. Ah, science. I've been getting kind of
excited about Assisted GPS as well, but that's a whole other story
which I might talk about when the new device I've ordered turns up.

Steph is back from India, but has now escaped the rescue geography
world because she got a new job. For which, of course, we say
congrats. We still miss you though Stephy...

So one or two bits & bobs this week, mostly relating to the October
Laboratory. Partly, in fact, to agree that it will be called a
'Lab' (LabOne, in fact) after much deliberation on this. On
Wednesday, in a discussion over budgets and exactly what would be
exhibited at the lab, Julia mentioned the need for something
interactive. Quite often at galleries/exhibitions etc. people do a
post-it-note exercise, where they share their
thoughts/feelings/reflections about what they've experienced. This
got me thinking about ways we could do this. One nice thing to do
would be to take the contemporary map of the area which we're going
to produce and give people different coloured pushpins and luggage
labels. You write your feelings about a location in the area on a
luggage label and tie it to a pushpin (green for an area/building
you like, red for one you don't like etc.) to mark the spot on the
map. I spent part of yesterday morning doing an electronic version
of this for the website, which is basically a
Google Map you can edit. So
anyone can drop a virtual pushpin onto a location and post text,
pictures or even video about that area.

Yesterday I was at MADE again, but this time for a meeting with
Jonathan Banks, the chief exec of
Ixia, which describes itself as a 'public art think tank'.
Jonathan has some really strong views about the role of public art
in urban regeneration, lamenting that it is too often an
afterthought in the development process - a lazy, bolt-on, tick-box
exercise. We had a really interesting discussion about what the
artists' commissions should be if we get the Arts Council money to
fund LabOne. He was very keen on the idea of setting up an
interdisciplinary panel, with three or four artists at its heart,
that could get together to produce something like an alternative
version of the Supplementary Planning Document which will eventually
be produced for the Lower Eastside Area. This is particularly
relevant given that the Big Plan for the city is currently being
finalised and will likely draw the city centre boundary at the River
Rea, thus encompassing a large area of Lower Eastside.

Incidentally I should mention that Richard Clay, one of my
colleagues over in the History of Art department, has just pulled in
a big grant to work with archivists and curators in the city on the
development of Birmingham's suburbs. I'm going to sit on the
steering group for this, in exchange for Richard sitting on the
evaluation panel for the Lab. This is going to be a really exciting
project and hopefully will give me a window into good practice for
closer collaboration with the museums and arts sector.

Last week was a bit hectic from my point of view. While James was
busy being buried in exam board duties up at Manchester, I found
myself with a whole bunch of things to do.

On Monday Alex started a ten week work placement at the University
as part of the EU's Leonardo programme for facilitating lifelong
learning. Alex is from Dresden and is looking for experience of
practical applications for GIS. So I've roped him in to doing some
of the GIS work for Rescue Geography. While he got to work
calculating the areas of different types of road network within our
study area I went along to a workshop on Reconstruction Heritage
organised by Peter Larkham at Birmingham City University.

Peter is an old friend and postwar urban heritage is one of his
great passions. It was an interesting day of papers, with some
representatives from English Heritage there - they're the guys who
are responsible for organising the listing of historic buildings for
preservation. So there was plenty of time to chat about the virtues
of preserving the Central Library building (which the City Council
would very much like to knock down) and the way that people value
the buildings created in that rush of urban planning in the quarter
century after the war.

Rescue Geography got a brief airing as part of a paper jointly
presented with Peter Larkham and Julian Lamb (who partly inspired RG
in the first place) and seemed to get quite a good reception. I
should, however, mention a great quote someone dug up from Thomas
Sharp - one of the key figures in post-war replanning - '...cities
have personalities and characters as men have, and the planner must
try to match the personality and character of the place he is
formulating...' (1946, p9). I love this idea of cities having
personalities and the need to capture what these personalities are
when thinking about replanning - it's rescue geography in a nutshell
and someone was saying this over 60 years ago.

On Tuesday we had another MADE lunchtime event, which followed on
from a lengthy planning meeting. Dan has started taking some of the
portraits of interviewees for the October laboratory, which is cool
- real sense that this is starting to come together. Lorraine
Boothroyd from Turner Townsend (consultants who are deeply involved
in Birmingham's Big Plan
document) and Richard Trengrouse (from the Digbeth Business
Association and one of our interviewees) came to the lunch. We had
a good discussion, particularly around James' idea of hotspots and
contours of valency which, unfortunately, I've not been able to do
any mapping of yet. Nonetheless, I think I've been better able to
explain James' ideas now that we've started doing the analysis and I
can see in my own mind the kinds of maps that will result - so we
should be able to produce something almost like clusters of meaning.

We also had quite an interesting discussion of Feng Shui and the
possibilities of mapping a Feng Shui analysis of Digbeth against
more conventional western models of planning. Given the presence of
two Chinese community centres within the area, this seemed like
quite an interesting possibility to explore further.

Beyond this, Alex has done a whole load more noise mapping for us,
which I'll get up onto the website relatively soon. Trying to
finish off a couple of academic things at the moment (grant
applications and papers) now that, all of a sudden, I seem to have a
proper amount of working time available. Thank goodness for the
summer break, when work really starts.

First things first, welcome Steph to the blog - nice to
have you here.

I've been feeling guilty lately that James has been
doing all the heavy lifting on the blog, particularly
writing about the Kidderminster meeting and the
analysis, so I should probably say a little bit about
what I've been up to.

At the last few presentations we've done, James has
talked about the analysis essentially being on two
levels - the first being quite schematic, number
crunching stuff and the second being the clever textual
analysis of meaning etc. So while he's been working his
way through the transcripts coding things, I've been
painstakingly fiddling with the GIS.

The first thing I've done is to think about the places
where people have walked and try to break this down into
categories. Clearly, when you walk in a city, you can't
just wander where you want and you tend to follow linear
features of one kind or another - particularly roads.
So I produced a list of the different types of features
that appear in Eastside:
1) Primary distributor roads (e.g. Digbeth High Street)
2) Secondary distributor roads (e.g. Fazeley Street)
3) Tertiary distributor roads (i.e. any of the back
streets)
4) Canal tow path
5) Paths (i.e. pedestrianised and 'other' areas)
I then looked at the areas where our interviewees have
walked and redrew the map of the area, categorising all
linear features into these five different types (I've
posted a working model of this in the
Downloads section of the RG website).

One of the problems of the GPS tracks is that they tend
to wander a little bit - if you look up close at any of
the tracks on the website, you'll see they often pass
through buildings etc. because the accuracy is at best
around 6m and, particularly around the viaducts, often
quite a bit worse than this. So I've used the tracks to
draw rough 'corrected' tracks, which could then be split
into pieces depending on what kind of linear feature
they were passing through. This allowed me to calculate
approximate distances walked within each feature type
and, again working back through the GPS logs, how long
was spent on each piece of the walk.

What's the point of all this? Well, one of the things
we were interested to find out in analysing the walked
interview method was whether external environmental
factors had an impact on the way people walked. Do
people, for example, avoid noisy roads and, where they
have to pass along them, do they walk more quickly?
Well, with all of this data about different road types,
times/distances we can work this out. And the answer
is... well, sort of. There does seem to be a bit of a
tendency to spend longer walking the same distance on
tertiary roads than primary. But the time/distance ratio
is pretty similar for primary roads and secondary and
people seem to pass most quickly at all along the canal
towpath. This might be because there's less to stop and
look at, but we're going to have to look at James'
content analysis data to unpick that a bit more clearly.

The other thing I've been doing is taking the hourly
recordings from the University of Birmingham's weather
station at the Botanic Gardens in Winterborne - just
over a mile and a half away from Eastside. I've plotted
the dry bulb temperature, windspeed and level of
precipitation against the length of interview, to see if
there's any discernable pattern. There's nothing
especially obvious, though it's reassuring to note that
the one occasion where I definitely know it was
hammering with rain (Jane's interview with Julia from
MADE) is the one occasion where we have rainfall
recorded at Winterborne - 0.2mm in the course of an
hour, which a meteorology colleague assures me is quite
a lot.

So, essentially, a lot of what I've been doing has shown
somewhat ambiguous/negative results, but it's good to be
generating this kind of data.

This said, however, I do have some concerns that we've
ended up doing some rather positivistic science i.e.
reducing people
to a bunch of statistics. Particularly as those
statistics are coming from the rather big brotherish
surveillance technologies of GPS and GIS. I think the
tension between this kind of approach (and the inherent
power imbalances it contains) as against the rather more
fluffy aims about empowerment that we have in mind for
the 'community' side of rescue geography are things that
we're going to have to unpick at some point.

I thought I really needed to get on here and attempt to
blog particularly as the lads have been so well behaved
recently...

Finally figured out what my password was and as James
and Phil have blogged about all the meetings I thought I
would write a bit about the prep work we are doing for
the "autumn laboratory" *cringe* this is most definitely
a working title and hopefully we will have a better name
by the end of Tuesday's meeting!

So I have been cracking the whip and forcing the
terrible two to *shock-horror* plan and manage their
time... there was some initial resistance as the lab is
technically 4 months away, however realising I was
leaving in 3weeks (and counting) seemed to convince them
it was all for the best.

We managed to have 2 highly productive meetings (albeit
one was very impromptu) in the last week and planned out
exactly which days we were doing which activities for
which groups (Schools, Professionals and Community)
inlcuding deciding who else would be giving seminars for
the professionals. Possibly completely confused Matt who
is from UCL and spending a few weeks at MADE in August
on a placement, but he seemed to go away happy in the
knowledge he was going to be doing some canal side use
surveying, although possibly with a very skewed vision
of what working in academia was all about!

I have a list of action points as long as my arm (not
that big then...) and they weren't all for me to carry
out (yay!)... there are a few nitty gritty
contract-styley bits to arrange between the university
and MADE and deciding which lucky few get invited to the
launch party for the lab/"THE BOOK" as well as
constructing invite lists for the different groups who
will be attending the lab to ensure we get good numbers.

Otherwise i'm just working on fleshing out the gantt
chart and getting highly excited about creating sub
tasks and other unrelated things such as urban explorers
(www.21dayslater.co.uk); walking
algorithms/psychogeography (spending far too much time
with geographers it seems!); and use of pervasive
media... i'm still buzzing from the pervasive media
workshop I went to in Bristol yesterday.

With all this work it must be almost time for me to go
to India only 14.75 working days left i calculated, but
with the ACE (Arts Council) Bid decision early august, I
might be back!!!

I'm currently playing with the first transcript,
trying to come up with a way to record information from
it about places that are mentioned and talked about.
The categories are a combination of things that the env
psychology literature flagged up as important in terms
fo how poeple relate to space and place, stuff that
seems obvious to us from a methodological point of view,
and some more experimental ways to try and capture local
history. At the moment I have the following categories:

Sorry about the formatting - that happens when you
import excel stuff into web text editors, but you get
the picture. There's plenty of issues - for
example, some places are mentioned more than once in the
transcript. It's hard to get the balance between
quantifiable typology and recording some qualitative
aspects of the data. I have gone for a half-way
house, with between 3 and 6 tags for each variable.
I've also numbered the 10 second boxes in the
transcripts so as to get a handle on the patterns in
which places are mentioned. It may also make it
easier to categorise the overall transcripts in terms of
discourse type.

Phil reckons these variables can be mapped quite
easily by importing into a GIS, which should produce
some interesting results. It's literally
spatialising discourse! Cool.

This one almost slipped through the net. Last
week we were invited over to Kidderminster by Ken
Harrison, head of their regen team, to discuss the
possibility of doing some RG work with them. Steph
came along too, in her role as our official 'handler'
and to represent MADE. Having enjoyed a free lunch
in the town hall and been introduced to Matt Barker (his
right hand man), Karen Alexander (arts and play officer)
and Amanda Hall (conservation), we rather appropriately
went out for a walk.

Kiddie seemed to have three main issues. The
closure of many of the large carpet factories located in
the town centre seemed to have allowed for relatively
low density retail developments to take their place.
As a result, some of the central areas resembled out of
town shopping developments, with lots of ground level
car parks and no real sense of place. The second
issue appeared to be the inner ring road, which not only
acts as a classic concrete collar around the central
area, but has broken many of the most attractive
historical roads in two. Perhaps the most
distressing example of this is the separation of the
beautiful church from the central area. Finally,
Kiddie seems to be a place with something of an identity
crisis, with unenviable listings in two recent
publications - Chav Towns and Crap Towns - compounding a
general sense of malaise.

Having said that, Ken highlighted a number of
opportunities. The town has a number of rivers
running through it that could be opened up. It
also has a very attractive skyline, with the towers
associated with the carpet factories slightly
reminiscent of Florence and rolling countryside visible
all around. Some of the areas in need of regeneration
have quite unique histories, and one of these, known as
the Horsefair, may be perfect for a rescue geography
follow up project. Traditionally populated by
traveller communities, the area is now characterised by
high levels of socio-economic deprivation and the
familiar set of problems that generally accompany this.

Plans for the area are only just being considered,
and Ken emphasised the need to get the local community
involved and enhance the unique heritage of the area...
he put it nicely when he said there was a need to
reconnect people with the space. In terms of
developing the RG methodology as an applied planning
consultation tool, the Horsefair regen could be ideal.
Ken and his team also seemed very keen to collaborate,
which means that we could get unprecedented access to
actors at all stages of the planning process. If
RG is going to have an impact upon the development
process this kind of upstream access is priceless.

We decided in principle that we would use Kiddie as
the focus for our son / daughter of RG research proposal
to the ESRC. By that time it was drinks-o-clock,
so we went and enjoyed a few bevvies in Ye Olde Seven
Stars.

Last Thursday we met to discuss how exactly we were
going to analyse the walking interview data that Jane
has managed to gather over the last 8 months. Lots
of ideas have been buzzing around, mostly from the odd
chat here and there, but nothing concrete had been
decided. So we decided to brainstorm it, thinking
of every possible thing we could analyse, and then work
through them to try and discover what would actually be
possible and / or desirable to do. Here's what we
came up with...

Things
we are attempting for the analysis

1)Time spent talking by interviewee and
interviewer as against silence in walking vs. seated
interviews (word count as proxy measure)

2)Scatter plot of general weather (Edgbaston
weather data) as against length of interview

Looks simple enough, but there is quite a lot of work
in some of these tasks. We split the work between
spatial analysis (anything involving the GIS),
which Phil is checking out, and the textual, which I'm
working on.

When I started going through the first walking
interview transcript two main difficulties became
apparent. Firstly, in terms of people mentioning places
or buildings, there are some issues with what counts.
So for example, people may mention a factory by name,
and then say in passing that there were three others on
such and such street. Technically they are making
a spatial reference, but in such a general way that
there is little practical worth in counting it. It
is a grey area.

The second issue is how best to organise the
analysis. So, for example, we are starting with an
excel spreadsheet that lists each 'place' mentioned in
the transcript and then recording various
characteristics about how, why and where the place is
mentioned. But boiling down these things into
analytical categories is difficult, because it is hard
to know how much detail to go into. For example,
is it enough to break places referred to down into
buildings, environmental features and roads, or are more
categories required?

As you go along grappling with these questions the
actual categories also change, as it become apparent
that some of the things we thought would be important
aren't, or that one category actually subsumes another.
The thing I have to keep reminding myself of is that
this exploratory process of trial and error is exactly
what a pilot project like RG is all about - it will take
a while to figure out the best way to do things!
Anyway, my first job tomorrow it to plough through the
first transcript...

This meeting threw up some more interesting people,
Nick Bird from ISIS and Pam who is an ethno-botanist.
Pam used to work at the Winterbourne Botanic Gardens,
and is working with none other than Jon Sadler on his
OPen Air Laboratories (OPAL) project. Small
world. We discussed RG and then ISIS' plans for Warwick
Bar, all interspersed with more general comments on
regen. As there were fewer people this time I'll
endeavour to group the things people said into distinct
topics...

1. Families and long-term viability

ISIS are very concerned to attract families to their
developments, as this ensures long term viability of
projects. The problem is that this requires all
sorts of infrastructure that developers can't provide in
isolation. The need for good schools is perhaps
one of the most intractable, and Pam has been doing some
work with them in this vein. She mentioned the
work of Birmingham Futures, who have evidence that young
pros would like to stay in the city centre when they
have kids. The need for long term viability is
driven financially by the potential for pension funds to
invest in developments that are seen as a safe long-term
bet. Assumedly ISIS are keenly aware of this
because they are part-owned by the Igloo fund already.

2. The need for distinctive developments

The second key priority for ISIS is to create more
distinctive developments. The more generic
developments aren't selling currently, a trend that is
exacerbated by the credit crunch. We actually
discussed the kinds of things that would be useful for
architects and designers to know about a place, and that
RG might be able to deliver. He was interested in
local knowledge, like little stories about what
buildings and what aspects of buildings matter, little
routes that are used, special places and so forth.
Julia mentioned the development in Manchester that was
branded and marketed around a rare water plant that was
found on the site.

3. Use of emotional mapping

This is the stuff that Phil talks about in the last
entry on the blog, where we sorted Steph out with a
crude emotional sensor and let her loose in Eastside
with a GPS. The specifics have been covered, but
it is worth noting how ISIS responded to the
possibilities. Nick could see the utility of being
able to turn qualitative data into quantitative, and it
was felt that if enough walks could be amalgamated to
identify places that are generally liked or disliked
then it would be a powerful tool to use to persuade
planners to do things. He mentioned the need to
persuade them to spruce up Fazeley St.

4. Consultation over Warwick Bar

OK so this was where we first got an idea of what
exactly it might be that we might do for these people.
They want to consult key stakeholders about Warwick Bar,
both in general and in terms of the specific creative
industry needs that the development might meet. We
now have a list of people who we need to do walking
interviews with. We discussed whether we would
need to be more prescriptive about the interviewing
process (e.g. confine them to Warwick Bar, tell them to
focus on one or two topics), but it was felt that it
would be more interesting and revealing if we stuck to
the original format, and MADE followed up our work with
more focused sedentary interviews.

5. Health and waterways

ISIS seemed quite interested in the idea of doing
some research on how people use waterways
recreationally, both on the water, and by the water on
towpaths. This started as a concern with the ways
in whcih Warwick Bar is used, and developed into a
discussion about the possibility of a more general
nationwide research project. in terms of Warwick
Bar, Nick mentioned that Birmingham is Britain's 'canal
city'. Recreation and waterways also keys into a
load of government research priorities - sustainable
transport and climate change, fitness and obesity.
ISIS have projects in Manchester that they would be keen
to get us involved with too.

There are a number of angles that could be taken on
this research, ranging from description of usage to
identifying motivations for use, to design issues that
may be used to encourage use. Then there are the
different user categories, ranging from cyclists and
joggers to fishermen and canal boaters. Myself and
Phil had a very brief chat afterwards about the possible
ways to package the research. A CASE studentship
springs to mind, but I felt a more heavyweight project
may be possible. Either way, ISIS would be a great
partner given the topic. Note to self - email nick
sketching some possibilities...

6.What to do for the Lab if we get no funding!

In general, do less for a shorter period of time!
I need to talk to Dan about the portraits. Julia
rightly commented that these are potentailly very
important, as they are like 'a personal invite' to
participate further. She also mooted the idea of forming
an artists group to liaise with the architects after the
lab. It was also suggested that Pam could provide
photos of 'urban nature' from around Eastside to project
at the lab, and she suggested that we could get groups
of kids value mapping around Eastside.

As an aside, the book seemed to go down quite well,
which has got to be a good sign too...

When we had the lunchtime meeting with MADE that James
has blogged about, I mentioned a project that the
World Bank have been funding in the Congo.
Essentially locals are given ruggedised handheld
computers with a very simple interface whereby they can
record the location of certain areas which they value in
different ways. The data gathered can then be used to
inform activities in the area by outsiders (particularly
logging).

I mentioned this to Julia because it occured to me that
we could do something similar for the Eastside
Laboratory, setting up some PDAs so that participants
can go out and do some simple mapping without having to
be taught how to use GIS software.

Steph from MADE had already put me onto
Mediascapes and
I've been playing with it a little bit. It has the
advantage of not taking up a lot of memory and being
free to download and install - it even works with mobile
phones if you've got a particularly flash one. So,
having spent the weekend finishing off my marking, I
settled down earlier this week to play with the
software.

Basically you can write your own 'mediascapes' which
people then download and 'play' on their own devices.
You need a little bit of knowledge of scripting using
Java which, frankly, I don't have, but figured out
enough to get something basic working. Essentially I
had a little map on the screen of the Eastside area and
a little man walks around the map as you walk around
following you using GPS. I programmed the mediascape to
record all the GPS locations and also record every time
you press the up or down button on your handheld
computer. Up and down could be used to stand for
anything that you want people to record (happy/sad,
safe/scared, interested/bored), but I decided to try out
'like/dislike'.

So on Thursday James & I went down to Eastside because
we were hooking up with Steph who is project managing us
at MADE. We dragged Steph out of the office - since she
put me onto the Mediascapes software in the first place
- and made her our guineapig logging the areas she likes
and dislikes in Eastside. This map is the result of her
walk around the area.

It's quite an interesting exercise, though if you only
have one person doing it, it becomes a bit arbitrary.
What is it that has made one area particularly likeable
and another not. I took the log file from the
Mediascape and put it into my GIS over lunch and got
Steph to discuss why she'd logged in certain ways in
certain areas. Which is fair enough, but as James
pointed out, it would be kinda interesting to get, say,
a hundred people to do this and then you could start to
identify broader patterns of likes and dislikes (or
whatever else you asked people to record).

Certainly Steph reported that it was a very easy
exercise to undertake. In fact she was doing it as we
were walking along talking about the project and also
stopping every now and again taking decibel readings to
add to our background noise map. It would certainly be
an interesting thing to do with groups wandering around.

We subsequently had another meeting with Ken Mossman and
also Nick Bird from ISIS on Friday morning and showed
them this exercise. As Ken pointed out, there are
issues about precisely what people are looking at when
they log a particular feeling, but there are ways around
this. One could use a helmet mounted camera to record
video footage of where a participant was looking, or
even use a device with an inbuilt camera to ask people
to take pictures of things they like/don't like. Still,
it's an interesting principle to have established and it
will be quite nice to do something more with this.

Those nice people at MADE set up a lunchtime meeting
for us to showcase Rescue Geography to practitioners
across the region. Just for the record, and because I
will undoubtedly lose the piece of paper with people's
names on, the people there were:

David Tittle

MADE

Ian Shepherd

D5 Architects

James Evans

Manchester University

Julia Ellis

MADE

Ken Harrison

Wyre Forest District Council

Ken Mossman

ISIS

Mark Kennedy

Turner & Townsend

Pamela Smith

Botanical Connections

Phil Jones

Birmingham University

Richard Trengrouse

Digbeth Business Association

Stephanie Basher

MADE

Vey Straker

Herefordshire Rural Media

We started off meeting people (or in the parlance of
modern times, 'networking'), which was interesting as I
started chatting to Ken Mossman who is project managing
ISIS' involvement with the Warwick bar site. As
usual when you talk to people at the sharp end you get a
different perspective on things, and he was very open
and honest about their plans for the area. Much
thought had been put into how to move existing industry
out of the area to free it up for development, and they
appeared to have decided the overall types of uses that
they want in the area. The specifics seemed very
much up for grabs at this stage, with plans for actual
buildings and streetscapes out to tender with architects
at the moment.

As well as reminding me what a complicated and
multi-staged process development is, this also indicated
that there are still many things in the redevelopment
that are 'up for grabs' as it were.

Julia then gave a brief intro about MADE and their
involvement in / hopes for the project, followed by me
and phil doing our usual double act, accompanied by the
obligatory powerpoint. Lots of pictures, clear
messages about what the project is, and a plea for help
in determining what kinds of analysis we should do and
how we should present it in order for it to be of any
use to the development process.

The talk went down fairly well and I'll try and
summarise most of the feedback here, in no particular
order than that in which people spoke (I have collated
all their comments into one paragraph)...

Joe: liked the way we focused on the experiential
element of space, and stated the need to incorporate
perceived meanings into the planning system, although he
echoed our question about how to make it actually feed
into the process... 'regeneration should reinforce
rather than obliterate meaning'...nice... He also
noted that Michael Parkinson's report on Digbeth which
included a range of people's views and memories didn't
appear to be being used by Urban Initiatives in their
Big Plan for Birmingham. Could RG be brought into
dialogue with the Big Plan or other methodologies?

Julia: can the technology make this a generally
applicable methodology? She also felt that the
visual outputs might make more of an impact and last
longer than a 'normal' public consultation, and that the
lab in September could keep the work 'alive' in this
sense. Really interesting point - she thought that
the walking interviews were empowering, as they allow
the participant to take control (cf community mapping
and local authorities). The overall experiential
focus also ties into ideas of 'cultural' sustainability'
which is starting to become a priority, as even AWM
begin to focus on regional identity.

Vey: the rural media company she works for have remit
to empower community through different media, so even
though it's rural there is a clear relevance...
She liked RG as a way to get buy-in from a community,
but felt that it needed to look at the future as well as
the past (which is a good point), and explore why
people like certain spaces. She told us a
little about the Hereford regeneration of the Edgar St.
grid, which is a massive area, and expressed some
interest in pursuing RG as a possible part of their
involvement in the scheme. She also felt that the next
stage really needed to consider what exactly about the
work is most important in terms of using it for real
world applications.

Ken M: noted the problem of timing in terms of when
it would feed into a development process - danger of
being either too early or too late. In terms of
the bigger picture, he noted the link between identity
and productivity within the quality of life agenda, and
suggested that any way to evidence this would be
attractive to local authorities putting together Local
Development Frameworks and developers more generally.
His take-home message also related to how to use RG to
inform design and help get planning permissions.
He also suggested a session with their architects and
possibly AWM, which would be v. useful.

Ken H: liked the deeper approach, and noted that RG
could be used in places that had been 'damaged' (by 60s
architecture etc which seemed fairly well received
despite Phil's protests), and that these places perhaps
need rescuing. Ken also told us about the current
consultation occurring in Kidderminster, and we
informally arranged to head over there for a walking
tour to discuss possible ways in which RG might be used
in this consultation process.

Ian: noted the need to capture uniqueness in order to
understand what makes a place successful. He also
liked the idea of overlaying tracklogs to find where
people tend to stop and use space. RG as a way to
build up a multi-layered appreciation of space that
avoids flattening all meaning. He sounded a note
of caution, saying that it would be hard to measure the
success of the method, which would be crucial to
potential end users.

David: reflected on the actual process from a
consultation point of view, and suggested that RG needed
to incorporate more dialogue between different groups.
For example, he suggested lay and expert knowledges,
inter-generational dialogue, male and female, car-user
vs. pedestrian and so on. This opens up a whole
range of possibilities. In terms of representivity
he also suggested an online consultation stage to allow
other interested parties to make their views heard.
He also made a point about the interpretation of
distinctiveness being rather subjective, although it is
widely recognised a central to the re-making of place.

So it was all very positive and as usual there are
many leads to follow up, but I have run out of steam now
as far as this blog is concerned, so will perhaps
reflect a little more after our next meeting @ MADE....
which is..... tomorrow morning!

Saturday saw
the achievement of (drum-roll, please) the 10th walking
interview, which was what we were aiming for (along with
the seated and 'double' interviews). In fact, it
was a really pleasant day, with 2 interviews recorded
within a few hours. I had my doubts about whether
the equipment would be up to recording 2 consecutive GPS
traces (I worry less about the audio despite the early
disaster), but all is quiet at the technical end of the
corridor (i.e. Phil's office) so here's hoping....

Now we just need another 3 people
to do 'double' interviews (along with 2 who 'owe' me a
walking interview - 1 is already arranged) and 7 seated
interviews. If you, dear reader, know anyone who
could help, it's not too late - and coffee is included.

Progress is also being made on the
transcripts. As an early birthday present (or
something), Phil bought me a natty piece of kit that
means I can play the audio files on the lap-top,
controlling the 'play' function with a foot pedal.
It's the same as Jon has been using to transcribe - it
means you can type and listen at the same time. It
also means that transcribing and checking can happen a
lot quicker as Jon and I don't have to keep swapping the
equipment between us. Plus, I can do it at home in
relative peace and quiet - particularly important in the
last couple of weeks as they have been resurfacing the
car park outside. So, to those of you who have
been interviewed: I hope to be in touch soon. Keep
checking your in-box (or snail-mail in a couple of
cases) for the transcript, then please check it and
return it (or comments) to me.

It's not quite true to say that I'm just back from
Boston as I got into Heathrow at 5am on Monday, but
today is certainly the first day where I've had
a) some free time
b) sufficient freedom from jetlag/a cold
to actually sit and update the blog.

The annual conference of the Association of American
Geographers is quite a big deal in the academic
geography scene, about five thousand or so people herded
into a large hotel (or three hotels in this year's case)
for four days. There are papers being presented from
8am to 6pm every day, with keynote talks going on 'til
9pm. If you actually tried to go to all of this you'd
go totally stir crazy, so the longer you've been doing
the job, the more time to spend hooking up with people,
having informal meetings and drinking a lot (a lot) of
coffee.

James & I were giving two papers - he presented our
'rhythm' film, which comes from another project, and I
talked about rescue geography. My paper was part of
Chris Perkins' Subversive Cartographies session, which
ran for most of Thursday afternoon. Loads of really
great papers and a packed room - loads of people having
to stand/sit on the floor in the first session. Stand
outs for me: Denis Wood's 'Lynch Debord' (biggest 'in'
joke of the conference); Bill Cartwright doing stuff on
Web 2.0 mapping as part of environmental protests in
Australia, where he came out against the lack of emotion
shown in the end products as compared with hand drawn
materials; James Craine & Stuart Aitken talking about
their project to undermine the corporatisation of
universities through a dis-orientation map for
freshers.

Rescue Geog went down well, bunch of really supportive
comments/questions afterwards. Interesting chat with
Chris Perkins, session organiser and colleague of James
at Manchester, which made me feel a bit less guilty
about using Google maps - apparently the Open Street Map
people have started working with the Ordnance Survey on
some things, so even the most subversive sometimes get
sucked in by 'the man' it seems. (I'm sure OSM people
would heavily take me to task on this.) We were also
asked whether we'd be interested in contributing to a
special issue of a journal as a result of the session -
basically a bunch of people working on the same kind of
topic all write articles which come out at the same time
in an academic magazine. This would be quite a nice way
of establishing rescue geog within the broader community
of cartographers - something which would be new to
myself and James as neither of us really consider
ourselves to be map scholars by trade.

But, anyway, a good time was had by all. I guess I
should probably stop here and upload the latest
interview track Jane has produced, cos she was busy
working while James & I were swanning around Boston.

Oh and the Arts Council application with MADE is almost
ready to go - Julia is doing last minute tweaks to the
budget then we can send it off. Exciting times, even if
I have been a bit distracted this week by helping a PhD
applicant finish off his application for funds from the
ESRC. He wants to use walking interviews (surprise,
surprise given that I'm involved) to explore spaces of
exclusion in the city, using 18-29 year old Muslim men
as his case study. This would be a really cool project
and fits into the broader rescue geog philosophy, so
fingers crossed he gets the funds.

Hah, so much for 'public' geography - far too long since
I last posted anything. In fairness, I've been mostly
marking, but other exciting things have been going on as
well.

Let's take things in some kind of order. Monday last
week James, Jane & I went down to the Peripatetic
Practices workshop organised by Jennie Middleton and
Hannah Macpherson at UCL. This was a really cool event
with a slightly daft title - it was all about walking
methods. Met a bunch of interesting people working on
similar (and entirely dissimilar) things with a walking
theme. Plus we were restricted to ten minute papers,
which meant no one had a chance to be boring, the curse
of any gathering of academics. Jane got a chance to
hook up with a lot of the people she'd emailed before
Christmas when putting together the review paper which
will be coming out in the journal
Geography Compass
shortly. Stand out papers for me were: Kathryn King
from Islington Council, talking about a walking
guidebook they'd produced to target 20-40something
professional women; Katrina Brown from the Macauley
Institute in Aberdeen talking about their work on
right-to-roam in Scotland (using very cool
helmet-mounted video cameras); and Andrew Clarke from
Leeds, who's got even more money out of the ESRC than we
have to do a really fantastic piece of ethnography using
walked interviews.

Anyway, rescue geography seemed to go down pretty well,
though as ever I think some of the mapping technology
intimidates people a little. On Wednesday I was at
Birmingham City University (formerly UCE) which is based
over in Perry Barr at the invitation of my friend Peter
Larkham. An interesting audience because they're more
practice-focussed with a number of people coming at
things from a planning point of view. So there were
lots of interesting questions about the potential
broader applications of the technique. A certain amount
of healthy cynicism too, with the suggestion that
planners wouldn't be particularly interested, although
developers might well be.

On which subject, our discussions with MADE have
progressed really well. Steph and I have been playing
with the Mscapes software developed down at Bristol -
we'll definitely put something together with this for
the end-of-project exhibition. That exhibition is now
the subject of an application to the Arts Council which
we're leading, though MADE are, let's be honest, doing
most of the work. Not only is this designed to pay for
a two week 'laboratory' demonstrating the techniques to
stakeholder groups, but also to launch a series of
commissions to artists to respond to Eastside and the
rescue geography project more generally. This would
also pay for some of Dan Burwood's photographic work
that has been developing alongside what we've been
doing.

So exciting times of late. James and I are off to the
Association of American Geographers Conference in Boston
next week - we'll spread the word to another continent!
When I get back I have to steer the Arts Council bid
through our Finance Department. The good news is that
our new Head of School is keen - he does a lot of bids
to bodies like the Heritage Lottery Fund as part of his
role with the Lapworth Geological Museum, which is his
baby in many ways. So it's all good. Will report on
AAG when James & I get back.

I was
never able to keep a diary going longer than 6 weeks, so
it's no surprise that I haven't blogged for ages.
But don't worry, 'walk 'n talk-ers', work has been
progressing. Not as fast as I would have liked
(Phil and James, too, no doubt), but progress has been
made. Things did take a little while to pick up
after Christmas, but eventually some really helpful
people got to know about our project and have been
encouraging friends and relations to join in.

So, the tally stands at:

Walking interviews - 7 done; 1
arranged.

Sedentary interview - 3 done.

Doubles - 5 completed; 1 to
finish (but this does include one walking interview
where the PDA failed).

Counting on my fingers
tells me that is 17 people interviewed, plus I have 3
more people to contact after Easter. (I don't
actually have 17 fingers - I had to take my socks off.)

In other news, I have
been receiving a steady stream of interview transcipts
from Jon, who is doing a good job of this essential, but
slightly tedious task! I am now trying to find
time to listen to the recording while checking the
transcript for accuracy, trying to remember what was
said in the bits we can't hear very well and assessing
the noise level. I then go through them a second
time to 'smoothe' them slightly - i.e. take out some of
the 'ums' and 'errs'. This is potentially
controversial as we are trying to reflect what people
say about the area. On the other hand, things that
make sense verbally look very strange written down, and
without hearing the inflection in the voice, meaning may
be changed. Also, it seems that few of us (and I
was horrified to discover that I am very much included
in this, given that talking is one of the key
requirements of my job!) can speak in proper sentences!!
While the interviews are always fine at the time, all
the 'ums' and repetitions while people think of the
right word makes following the thread of the
conversation difficult - not to mention rather boring.
Transcripts are then sent to the interviewee to ensure
that they are a correct reflection of what was said -
and it also gives the respondent a chance to take out
any comments that may have slipped out inadvertently.
It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes if we feel
comfortable with someone (and I hope you all feel
happy being interviewed by me!) we forget that the
recorder is running.... Anyway, once I get the OK
from the interviewee, I select some of the stories to go
on the website, and Phil does something technical which
attaches the text to the GPS location et viola!
- it appears on the website. Look out after Easter
for more....

Well, it keeps me out of
mischief.

So, as Easter
approaches, I wonder 'where did the time go?'
Well, actually, no. I really think - 'yippee,
holiday!' Happy Easter, all - I'll be back in a
couple of weeks.... xxx

Well, I was snowed under with marking for most of
February (just finished the last of the first batch this
morning - more coming in on Friday) and I was frustrated
because something which almost worked wasn't quite
working.

I've been trying to find a way of getting the
transcripts up on the website in such a way that you
could follow the conversation around as the walk was
undertaken. The first step was to attach the
transcripts (which our transcriber Jon has broken into
10 second chunks) to the GPS points recorded during the
walk (every 10 seconds). I did this by putting each 10
seconds of text into a cell in Microsoft Excel, along
with a number from 0-3 which Jane has generated for each
ten seconds to indicate the level of background noise on
the recording (buses going by being 3). In ArcGIS I
joined the Excel tables to the GPS logs and then
exported these to KML using a script called
Export to KML which is produced by the City of
Portland Bureau of Planning. This allowed me to use the
text from the transcript as the KML Feature Label - as
well as use the background noise number to refer to one
of a series of little picture files I created to
represent increased volume.

All this I'd done before and the logs look fine in
Google Earth or on the Google Maps site, both of which
automatically generate a table of contents based on the
Feature Label for each point. I wanted, however, to
have this table of contents embedded on the Rescue
Geography website. This apparently simple thing has
taken me absolutely ages to figure out and I have to
acknowledge Mike Williams, who has an excellent tutorial
on using Google Maps code. He has also written a very,
very clever little piece of script called
EGeoXML which allows you to do all kinds of things
to take data from your KML files and present it on your
website in a variety of ways.

The upshot of all this (yes, I know, it's tedious, but
it's a field diary of the developing method) is that for
Blair Kesseler's interview (which Jane did back in
October) we now have the full transcript with a numbered
table which allows you to click and have balloons open
on the map in the order of the text - following the
conversation. We also have a series of edited
highlights on his main page, with a drop down box (again
generated using EGeoXML) allowing you to jump to the
stories Blair told about different locations.

While I'm here I should probably say something about
CP's question to James mentioned in his last post. KML
is now a fairly standard format for exchanging
geographic data on the web. Anyone who wants to can
take our KML files and do other things with them -
you're only limited by your expertise in understanding
the (basic) programming language underneath them, rather
than whether you have access to GIS software like
ArcGIS. While there are other ways of getting this
lovely data onto the web, Google do make it very easy
for the amateur dabbler in code such as myself. I will
confess that I am uncomfortable about using Google for
all of this stuff for a number of reasons:
i) they are an evil multinational
ii) the free map service could be withdrawn at any time
iii) questions of futureproofing - the site currently
uses the latest version of KML and Google Maps, but will
this code be supported by whatever the successor
applications are in, say, ten years time.

There are, unfortunately, practicalities. We don't have
an ArcIMS server to run all this stuff directly from my
GIS to the web. Even if we did, the license to run
Ordnance Survey data (i.e. to indicate where the streets
are) on ArcIMS is utterly extortionate. It's also not
very shareable. So KML is definitely the way forward.
But why use Google and not one of user-generated map
sites?

Essentially while I'm pretty good at this kind of stuff,
I'm incredibly dependent on people like Mike Williams
posting stuff on the web explaining how to write/use the
code and, for the moment at least, the vast majority of
people who know about these things are writing about KML
as it relates to Google. I may one day figure out how
to live a Google-free existence, but for the moment it's
a bit like having a car - I cycle as much as possible
and someday I may get rid of the car, but it's awfully
handy having one when you want to go to the shops...

Rescue geography hit the University of Manchester
today, with a repeat of last month's seminar for my new
(ish now) colleagues. Again I was slightly
hesitant presenting something which is very much a 'work
in progress', and again there were people in the
audience who list GIS amongst their primary research
interests (yikes).

But again the response was really positive, with
another set of highly thoughtful comments at the end for
us to muse upon. I'm going to list them here so
that they are recorded somewhere other than my own
wetware...

KW suggested that the tension between lived and
planned space in the sustainability process was akin to
that between use value and exchange value... prompting
some interesting thoughts about how the notion of
sustainability might be positioned within wider academic
debates. This resonated with what Sunand Prashed
had said about sustainability needing to be the balance
between modernity and tradition last week...
Another paper idea to chuck on the back-burner...

He also mentioned Jane Jacobs work on forensic
geographies, where she recovers artefacts from a
condemned Glaswegian tower block, which really reminded
me of the paper I saw a few years ago where a New York
artist was trying to capture the sense of place attached
to a condemned tenement block. Wish I could
remember their name...

CP asked a whole series of questions... luckily for
me none of them were technical GIS questions! Must
buy him a drink sometime... The one I didn't
answer was why we were using Google, an evil
multinational company, for something that we want to be
public... well I guess the answer is that the public all
use Google, so to reach them we must too... there are
definitely more issues to go into here though.

NC asked why we didn;t just use maps and draw where
we went on them, which made me realise that time is as
important as space in terms of this project. We
need to know where AND when people say things.
Also, despite the teething problems with the equipment,
once you get these tracklogged transcripts there are so
many things that you can do with them.

MJ pointed out that walking interviews might actually
confine or tie the conversation to the surrounding
environment, which was something I hadn't considered.

BR and JB (and some others) raised the question about
sampling and representativeness, and how this may be a
problem if we start feeding 'results' into planning
processes.

BR also suggested using the same route for
respondents, which would allow for greater
comparability. We had considered this, but decided
against it, I guess because it would preclude
exploration of memories and personal attachments.
It did make me think that there are effectively two
levels of environmental prompts: there are the purely
functional / practical, like noise levels, and then
there are the highly subjective, like attachments to
place. The project will definitely work on the
first level, but how much rigour we can bring to our
analysis of the second level is less certain.

The only bad thing was that I seemed to go on for
longer this time... Hope I'm not turning into a bore...
no really... it keeps me awake at night... perhaps I
need help...

So the seminar went really well. Silvia
Gullino, the lovely person who had invited me down to
speak to them, had organised a really great event, with
lunch and a range of people in the audience, including
sociologists, GISers, planners and students.
Everyone was really friendly and I have to say I got a
really good vibe from everyone at the C-SCAIPE research
centre there.

So, how did the paper go down? Well I have to
say I don't think I've ever had a more positive response
to a paper. People seemed genuinely enthused, and
had lots of great ideas for how we could proceed with
analysis. What's more, Silvia had advertised the
talk on various email lists, and I have had about 5
enquiries subsequently asking for copies of our
submitted paper (from overseas as well as UK).

Jane has started a contact list in a 'friends of the
project' style, and this also seems to be a great idea
as we can act as a bit of a hub for this work.
Will be nice to meet some of these people at the
peripatetic workshop as well, especially with one eye on
the follow up 'Son of Rescue Goegs' project...

Anyway, all this has confirmed my suspicion that
walking methods are rapidly becoming falvour of the
month. When I find the piece of paper that I
scribbled down people's suggestions on I'll post them
here as well...

Well I haven't found that piece of paper, but i have
remembered one particularly interesting suggestion.
This was a planner who suggested that developers might
be more interested in this sort of thing than planners,
as showing sensitivity to a community and an area may
give them a competitive advantage in winning tenders for
certain parts of developments, like those on lower
eastside which are supposed to be creative, sensitive
and so on... interesting idea, target develpers instead
of planners. After all, people are always saying
that they are the ones with all the power...

You can tell it's term time in Birmingham, while
University of Manchester are in the middle of their exam
period. I have been somewhat frantic over the last
couple of weeks while James has been largely sitting at
home playing with Facebook and generally being able to
get through the day without running between teaching and
endless meetings with students.

The meeting with MADE prompted me to finally get around
to upgrading the website, which I'd built with HTML as
it was written circa 1994 - functional but not exactly
pretty. The web design software I'd ordered in
September turned up toward the end of last term and I
only got around to learning how to use it a few weeks
ago. Anyway, I sat down last weekend and moved
everything into a new template and even spent some time
learning XML in order to create a database to work
underneath the interview page. Very dull, but I was
pretty pleased with myself. At least our web presence
is a little more professional looking now.

Warning, this next
bit gets very techie.

Faffing around with HTML (page layout code), XML
(database code), KML (mapping code) and other computery
things has brought me back to thinking about solving the
problem of presenting the interview transcripts. (Yes,
I know, they're still not on the website, in spite of
many promises!) I woke in the middle of the night last
week thinking I can do this by creating HTML tags in
Microsoft Excel (which is where we've got the transcript
text, broken into 10 second chunks to match the GPS
log), then using ArcGIS to connect the HTML text and the
GPS points and export it as a series of formatted text
balloons in a Google Map. Then I could set up an
animation to run through each balloon in turn to allow
people to 'listen' to the transcript in its location.
Yes, my dreamscape is filled with such excitement.

Well, it turns out I'm not quite right about this
because of the way I've been exporting the GIS data into
the Google Earth KML format. The script I've been using
doesn't cope well with HTML tags as it tries to rewrite
them into a different format to work with KML and
doesn't quite manage this. So I think I'm going to have
to consult with friend, colleague and GIS-genius
Lee Chapman to see if he can tell me how to write
scripts in Visual Basic to run in ArcGIS. This scares
me quite a lot...

Less techie stuff
now.

Anyway, what I have managed to achieve this week is to
create a new map (available on the
Downloads page of the site) which allows you to
click on locations within Eastside and hear a minute
worth of ambient sounds recorded at that location. I
did the recording this Thursday, which was a beautiful
crisp, cool winter day with no rain. I wanted to get
workday sounds, hence why I cycled madly into town on a
weekday in an unexpected gap between two meetings. I'll
confess that I haven't made a fantastic job of the
recordings - slowly working out how to use the new audio
recorder. Most of the recordings were too quiet and I
had to artificially amplify them (which has made some of
the quieter ones a bit 'fizzy'), hence I may go and do
them again at some point. Still, the stereo microphone
works really nicely - it's quite eerie listening to them
with headphones on, because they do give a really strong
sense of space.

The next thing to do is something similar but with a
first edition Ordnance Survey map and pop up balloons
with historic photos from the Central Library. But
that's not going to happen just yet. I haven't actually
had a day off in the last two weeks and I really,
really need
some sleep. I'm going to get some teaching stuff ready
for Monday now, then go to the cinema and probably doze
off...

Realised last night that i am supposed to be
presenting a research seminar on the project in two
weeks time. When i say 'realised' what i mean is
that the organiser emailed me asking for a title and an
abstract. mind duly focused.

Working on it today has made me realise what a great
project this is... we've got photos, stories,
techno-toys, art, labs, videos, walking tours,
anecdotes, a strong acadeic rationale, and at least two
exciting topics to address.

Rock on.

I'm just hoping now that the bunch of planners i'm
presenting to will like it. The 'discussant' for the
seminar is a hardcore stats guy - works on the census,
say no more. There's no results, and i'm no GISer.
Hopefully the pictures will fly, and the mobile methods
theory will lend credibility. Will post in a
couple of weeks to describe how it all goes...

We had a great meeting with some very nice people at
MADE last Friday. To continue this blog's general
obsession with the weather, it was a very unpleasant
day... rain, wind, cold, a full house of fetidness.
I had wet feet by the afternoon as we were trying to
film outside for part of the morning. Could have
picked a better day. We may have to relocate to LA
for the next shoot... But I digress...

MADE are a regional version os CABE - into
sustainable cities, quality design, community
involvement and the such. We've come across lots
of their previous work, using artists of various types
to uncover hidden aspects of cities and towns.
Anyway, they have a really nice office in an old canal
masters house in the middle of Eastside, and we had a
meeting with Julia and Stef to talk about how they might
be able to help us with the project. Stef made me
a nice cup of spiced apple tea.

They were really clued up on the creative / artistic
/ community engagement side of things, while also being
embedded in networks with planners and regeneration
bods. Both of these things were of great interest
to us.

The main things to come out of the discussion were
that they could help make our end of project event much
more than just a one-off thing. They have two
large function rooms on the ground floor, and offered
them to us to for the event, which is wicked as we
hadn't found anywhere suitable. The rooms are just
the right size - about 15'*20'.

Julia suggested that we don't call it an end of
project event, but an 'Eastside Laboratory', where we
get lots of different groups of people to come in and
engage with the project's outputs. She suggested
getting the local community in, but also hosting a day
for planners and local regen bods to try and get some of
the work to feed into policy and masterplannig for the
area. We liked that idea. This also made me
think about the possibility of getting some follow up
funding based around the idea of knowledge transfer...
MADE were really into making it policy relevant in some
way, so this seemed like a good idea all round.

She also suggested that the lab could run for two
weeks to a month, and we could get school kids in too.
This would also help them fulfill their educational
remit. They also mentioned maybe 'branding' the
event for us... god knows... we need some help with our
brand...

Funding was also discussed, with reference to the
event itslef, and how to facilitate turning some of our
outputs into forms of art. Julia suggested that an Arts
Council bid between us and them, with three of four
named artists including briefs of what work they would
do might be a goer. It would also be useful to
orient this towards making art relevant to the community
and policy makers. She said she might be able to
make a few calls and see whether the Arts council people
would be receptive to such a suggestion.... Beyond
that, it appeared that both the project and MADE might
have enough odds and sods floating around in various
budgets to make the event happen anyway.

The timing would be critical - in order to prepare as
fully as possible, but still fall within the project
timeframe, we settled on middle of sept 2008. so
we need to put boot to ass in order to get these funding
apps in by Easter. Must speak to Dan about it, he
wrote us something that would be appropriate for the
arts council bid a few months ago - need to find out
whether he has done anything with it yet.

The details of what exactly to do in the lab were
discussed, although no firm decisions were made.
Consensus was that it needs to involve ICT, and be
interactive, although this would mean that tehcnical
support would have to be available. It would also
need to 'be done right' in order to have a
positive impact.

Their description of a mediscape reads as follows:
"A mediascape is a collection of media fragments
associated with
positions in space. You experience the media fragments
as you walk
around the space."
http://www.mscapers.com/home

the software can be used on a GPS handheld device as far
as we can ascertain, and we were all excited about the
possibilities of using some of our outputs in this
way... further investigation needed though.

Anyway, it was only an hour and a half, but we
covered a lot of ground. We were singing from the
same hymnsheet (as it were) and it really felt like we
had something to offer them and vice versa. if
only all meetings were as pleasant and productive. Stef
even offered to introduce Jane to some of the hidden
parts of digbeth. cool.

Welcome back everyone - and especially the bold
interviewee who came out with me this morning on a
(shortened) walk around the Warwick Bar area! The
monsoon-type rain made us think twice, but as it seemed
to be easing we went out anyway.

Yes, it was wet - it
turns out that my expensive raincoat doesn't withstand
Midlands monsoons at all! - but two interesting points
were noted:

1) We do need weather
like this in order to assess if it has an effect on
walking interviews!! We went, but I am assured
that it was a shorter walk than if it had been dry.

2) It was really peaceful
once we left the main roads - after a couple of weeks of
peace and quiet chez Jane, I was really
noticing the heavy traffic in the centre of the city.
However, once we got into smaller streets and along the
canal, it was really quiet, with the rain damping down
the traffic noise and keeping most (sensible)
pedestrians at home.

A big
THANK YOU
to all of the people who have helped out with 'Rescue
Geography' so far - academics who have shared papers,
presentations and words of encouragement, people at
Central Library who have helped with finding old photos,
Dan who is hopefully taking lots of new photos, people
who have helped to 'spread the word' about the
project and, above all, the interviewees who have told
me fascinating stories about the past, present and
future of Digbeth/ Deritend/ Eastside.

It's extremely good having Jane working full time on
this project, because I keep seeming to get bogged down
in other things and forgetting about it. Lots and lots
of student-related things, which is a bit frightening as
this is supposed to have been the term where I have very
little teaching and so can get on with research stuff.
So I'm absolutely not looking forward to coming back in
the new year.

But enough of my woes. The GPS failure was my fault as
I'd left the charger in my desk drawer (which is full of
bits of electronica both useful and massively obsolete)
and forgotten to give it to Jane. But it does reiterate
the point that this is a right pain to sort out at times
as there are so many things to keep charged / switch on
when walking.

I have been playing with shading the paths on the
website maps to give a sense of direction being walked,
which I think works quite well - I particularly like the
pale to dark blue which seems to fit nicely with the
underlying colours of the google maps. Cartographic
experimentation, it's a bit like proper geography!

Going to simplify things a bit in the new year as the
tablet PC has proved not to be particularly useful in
terms of a prompt. In fairness it was always a bit of a
stretch to see whether people would be interested in
watching their progress around the map in 'real time'
(or with a minute or so delay between screen
refreshes). But we've proved that this is something
that could be done in principle - particularly if the
person running the interview is pretty happy faffing
about with GIS. Something to be expanded on in a future
project probably. It gave an opportunity to rethink how
we use technology in the field at least. Nonetheless
I'm sure Jane will be delighted at not having to heft
around a heavy computer on her walks.

Other piece of good news was that the ambient noise
recorder has finally turned up (only three months after
it was ordered!) so James & I are going to go out in the
new year and sample some of the sounds of Eastside as
they currently exist. Doubtless I'll connect these to a
google map in some fashion (ah, the joys of google
mapping) and James has talked about persuading a friend
of his to connect these into some dance beats, a bit
like the
Birmingham Frequencies project by Biosphere and Higher
Intelligence Agency.

In the meantime, however, I'm going to fiddle with some
more of next term's lectures and contemplate my stack of
Xmas marking. Joy to the world, good will to wo/men
etc.

It's been a
while since there was an update on this page, so sorry
if you have been trying to follow our progress - it's
actually been quite good recently! I've managed
six interviews in the last couple of weeks and would be
out now if the battery in the GPS 'bleeper' hadn't
failed this morning.

After the last appeal for more
women to come forward and talk to me, I've interviewed
... one! But have arranged to speak to another in
the new year. So, the current interview situation
is:

Walking interviews - 4
completed, 1 arranged

Traditional, sedentary
interviews - 0 (given the choice between these and
walking interviews, no-one wants to do these - well,
they don't capture the imagination quite the same,
do they!), but I'm hoping to arrange one soon

So, that's 9 (or possibly 10)
respondents out of the hoped-for 30! Not bad, but
it does mean that there will be more of a sense of
urgency when we all come back after Christmas.

Anyone hoping for a hint of the
likely results will be disappointed, though. I am
currently veering between having complete confidence
in the improved results that come from a walking
interview and being absolutely impressed by the
thoroughness of the sedentary interviewees. In
true academic style, the answer so far is - 'more work
needs to be done'!! (Never mind the PhD, it's
coming up with answers like this that prove your
credentials!!). I can report, though, that so far
all the interviews have been really, really different.
I have heard views from people who look at the area
through artistic eyes, through having spent childhoods
and teenage years there and through having worked with
disadvantaged people. Many stories have had happy
associations, a few have highlighted how the area has
been/ can be a place of fear - sometimes it's difficult
to imagine the infinite variety of meanings that a place
has! This is perhaps not very surprising, but
certainly makes 'data gathering' (doesn't that sound a
poor turn of phrase, given the rich variety of stories I
have actually been recording!) an absolute pleasure.
Analysis may well be another matter, but I am really
looking forward to getting the corrected transcripts
back in order to see what is really going on, rather
than replying on my (fading) impressions of the
interviews.

On the technology side, everything
has acted up at some point, but has mostly been
well-behaved (especially when switched on, charged up,
etc). As the maps on the interview pages show, the
GPS signal has been a bit inaccurate. It gives the
impression of us walking straight through (or maybe
over!) buildings and magically jumping from street to
street, especially in the northern corner of Digbeth.
Maybe it's something to do with the power of the
Bullring, atmospherics in outer space, or a lack of
power left in the GPS unit. We'll see on the next
walk....

I've just
arranged my fifth interview and noticed that only men
have been volunteering to be interviewed! While
they have all been very interesting, this is surely not
going to give us a very balanced view of Digbeth and
Deritend.

Or is it?

Are these areas 'for men'?

Don't you ladies visit anywhere
here?

I know some of you do because I've
seen you working in cafes and other businesses and
providing support services. So, come on girls,
tell me what you think about the places and spaces of
Digbeth/ Deritend/ Eastside.

As the only girl on this project,
I'd really like to talk to you.

Don't let the Spice Girls' message
be in vain - let's see a bit of 'Girl Power'!

A really interesting interview
with a respondent who spoke clearly, made fascinating
observations and was thoughtful about his own place in
Eastside.

Our aim of assessing walking
interviews was also given a boost, as it appeared to me
that the beginning and end of the interview 'proper'
were even more blurred than usual. I usually chat
to interviewees while setting up the equipment (although
that used to mean a tape recorder - this project really
has Equipment!), and we usually chat afterwards.
Frequently, this is when the really good observations
are made!! However, with a 'normal' interview
there is a kind of formal ending, usually with me giving
the respondent a chance to ask questions or make any
other comments. In this case, though, the whole
interview had been more of a chat and before we reached
the end of the walk, my respondent was asking me
questions about the project and my own academic
background - something that usually happens
'afterwards', off-tape. Does this prove the
increased informality of the walking interview - and,
therefore, its value where informality is particularly
useful? Or is it a one-off, dependent on the
character of this one interviewee????

Yes, very interesting!

But...

It rained! And we discovered
that bad weather doesn't put off all respondents!

And...

(Future employers look away now!)
The audio recording failed!! Yes, I confess, I
hate anything more technical than a tape recorder, and
my relationship with them has been fraught on occasion!
It may have been the rain, gremlins in the machinery-
or, more probably, I didn't turn it on properly.
Still, this interviewee did want to be anonymous
,
although probably not to the extent of silence....

So, learning points:

1) just looking at the weather
forecast isn't enough - sometimes it is correct and you
have to act on it!

Jane has just gone off to do another interview, this
being the first that she's had to do while it's been
raining. I feel vaguely guilty sitting in my nice warm
office. Hey ho, the joys of being in charge...

The
website has been given a bit of a facelift, now that
we actually have some research materials collected to
put on it. It's still quite basic in terms of its
underlying structure and appearance, but that doesn't
much matter - at least it's a bit clearer to navigate
now.

One of the philosophical things underpinning this
project is the commitment to making the data publicly
available/sharable. This has traditionally been a
bit tricky with GIS (mapping) data, but there are a
number of tools out there now which make things a lot
easier. Hence on the webpage now in the 'interviews'
section you can have a look at maps showing where Jane
walked with the participants, based on the sat nav (GPS)
tracks recorded at the time. At some point
relatively soon we'll start adding extracts from the
transcripts as well - Jane's just checking over the
great work that one of the Department's postgrads has
done in transcribing interviews recorded in a noisy
urban environment. Incidentally, a bit of fiddling
with the output levels from the mics and it has to be
said that we've managed to get some amazingly high
quality recordings - even with buses blasting past on
Heath Mill Lane.

The maps on the webpage are based on Google Maps.
Okay, here's the geeky bit (well, this is
supposed to be a record of how we actually do the
research). First I took the GPS tracks into ArcGIS
- the hardcore mapping software we're using. Then
I converted the 'point' files, where the GPS records the
location every 10 seconds, and made them into polylines
- basically joining the dots. These I exported as
KML files - this is a file format used to exchange
spatial data on the web, it's a bit like HTML in that
it's a text file with a series of codes in it
indicating, for example, where to put a dot on a map.
You can open KML files directly into Google Earth, but I
wanted to try and embed some maps into the web page I'm
making for each interview we do. If you make KML
files (and many cheap sat nav boxes can record location
tracks as KML for you to download onto your computer)
you can open them within Google Maps (go to Google and
click 'maps'). If you put those KML files on your
website, you can get Google to generate some HTML code
that you can put in your own webpages which will embed
the map into your page.

Simple.

Well, okay, not hugely simple. It's a bit of a
faff, but it means you can share all kinds of spatial
data with people who don't have sophisticated GIS
software themselves and without having to spend tens of
thousands of pounds on specialist GIS web servers and
licences to use Ordnance Survey data - you just put your
data on top of Google's maps.

So that's what I was up to this afternoon. Most
of the days when you end the day thinking "I've earned
my money today" you've been doing something really
tedious. It's nice when you've been doing
something interesting and still get that feeling.

Oh and we've put links up to photos we've got from
our interviewees that are being hosted on Flickr if you
want to have a look. That's the strange thing
about the web these days, you don't really need a lot of
storage space yourself - you can make use of other sites
and simply link all the data together. Which is
kind of what Web 2.0 is really about.

Yes, even
though it was Saturday, a researcher's work is never
done - well, that's not quite true, but this sounds more
interesting!

Another fascinating walking
interview discovering new streets and old histories.
One place I have visited is St Basil's in Heath Mill
Lane. (Soap box alert!) NB, make sure you support
St. Basil's Big Sleep Out/ Sleep In (I particularly
like the 'Sleep In' for those of us who have a choice
about such things and like our beds) on November 30th!
In talking to people who have become homeless or reading
the Big Issue, I am often struck by how easy it is to
lose one's home, so help prevent youth homelessness by
supporting St Basil's. (Down off the soap box and back
to the interview!)

As I was saying, another
fascinating walk round in (fortunately) unremarkable
weather and some amazingly quiet streets - away from the
main roads and the Gigbeth events. I learnt about
'Dirty Deritend' not necessarily being a derogitory
comment, more a factual observation, given the animals,
etc. Also, while most of the stories told related
to within a lifetime, right at the end we talked about
the Civil War history of Birmingham. Just because
you can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there....

I still need people to talk to -
not all have to do a walk. I would like to do some
'normal' interviews, too, just sitting down (perhaps
with a coffee - milk, half a sugar, please). So if
you have been following the blog or seen the leaflets
and have ANY link with Eastside (living, working, now,
in the past) do get in touch.

The sun was
shining, it was dry and not too windy or cold.
This isn't just the British obsession with the
weather, it may turn out to be significant in getting
people to walk and talk with us - stay tuned for the
final verdict in a couple of months time....

The talking bit was really
interesting. This is why I wanted to join this
project - to find out people's stories and histories.
What this building used to be, why it is special to
someone, what happened here. My mind is still
putting together the stories and places.

Then, an unexpected thing happened
(although that says more about me separating work and
personal lives) - we stopped to talk to someone else.
An old photograph had been promised, as my interviewee
had links with the building now occupied by someone
else. It was a really interesting few minutes for
all of us, plus it demonstrates perfectly the community
that some say doesn't exist in Eastside. No
community? Well, I saw some today!

In fact two unexpected things
happened - the other was the photographs that I was
given. We have permission to use them in our
project so I expect they will appear hereabouts before
long (but that's technical, so I'm not doing it!).
Those photos, plus the links with our photographer
friend, Dan, and the archives at Birmingham Central
Library look really promising for this project being an
important local record.

One complaint, though - the bag
with the equipment in is really heavy! I hope our
project has a budget for massage or physiotherapy....
On the other hand, I really didn't notice it when we
were actually doing the walking and talking - testament
to how interesting it was.

Finally, are walking interviews
worth doing? On the evidence of one interview -
yes! I think that we followed a route that had
been thought out beforehand, but still there was an
occasion when we looked at a building "while we are
here", so we did see things that were prompted by our
being out and about.

Sadly, tomorrow's interview has
been cancelled for now because of illness, but if anyone
reading this thinks it looks like fun - it is! Get
in touch, we still need people to talk to us.

Now, Phil's got all the
techno-stuff to play with, so time for coffee.

Yes, I see
them in my sleep - those green leaflets saying "WANTED:
Tales, stories and histories about Digbeth,
Deritend and
Eastside!" Many of them are
now loitering around the said areas, in cafes, pubs and,
hopefully, in homes. Electronic versions are also
circulating in the ether.

And - joy! -
a couple of offers of help have come in! Two
interviews have been arranged for next week and I'm
waiting for another couple to get back to me, so its
not-quite-panic-stations-but-slightly-stressing.
Will the technology work? Will we be able to hear
the recording? Will people turn up? If they
do, will they speak? Well, yes, apart from the
techno bits, I've done this before - people do usually
turn up (eventually) and even the shy ones end up
talking. After all, this is the best bit of the
research process - actually meeting people - and I
promise that it is fun for the interviewees, too.
It's not often that people really do
want you to talk about yourself, is it!

So, if you have read the leaflet,
come and take one of us on a guided walk around
Eastside. We only need another 28 people!
It'll be fun - and good exercise.

Busy couple of weeks. I'm going over to the newly
rebranded Birmingham City University (formerly UCE
Birmingham) tomorrow to give a talk about the project
and one or two other bits 'n pieces. An opportunity to
spread the word a bit, especially among those who are
more actively connected in to planning practice than
ivory tower geographers.

We had an interesting meeting last week with Pete James
from
Birmingham Central Library. He's library's Head of
Photographs and a friend of
Dan Burwood
who we've hooked up with for potential collaboration.
Hopefully we'll be able to get a joint project going
linking some of Dan's ideas for a project relating to
community portraits along with some of the historical
material that Pete can give us access to, combining
these with the stories we're hoping to get from our
interviewees.

On that subject, Jane's put together our
project flier which we've been distributing, partly
thanks to the Eastside Community Group and partly with
myself and James having a quiet afternoon wandering
around local pubs and leaving fliers on the bar. It's a
hard life sometimes. Jane is hoping to hook up with a
guy from the St
Basil's Centre, a big homeless charity which is
based out of a former church on Heath Mill Lane, deep
within our study area. So things are moving along. Of
course then comes the difficult task of deciding quite
how the recording should be transcribed with all kinds
of techie decisions about how to link the transcript to
the GPS tracks. Which, naturally, I'm immensely looking
forward to, given my status as resident geek.

As Co-Investigator on this project, and having been
suitably shamed into action by my co-workers enthusiasm
for this blogging malarkey, I though it was about time
something went on here from me. To be fair I have
just moved jobs to uni of Manc, and the task of setting
up and running a new Masters course in a completely new
dept has eaten up the time somewhat.

So first impressions of how the project is going:

there's lots of potential for collaboration with
other people working in, on and around Eastside.
My long time friend Dan is a photographer who is working
on social aspects of community in the area and has
produced some amazing shots of 'life' as it unfolds in
the pubs and streets of Digbeth. Having known Dan
for ages and really loving his work the potential of
working together is exciting.

playing with all this technical equipment is going to
raise a helluva lot of practical issues... as the others
have been noting, even something as simple as recording
outside, whether it is ambient noise or voices, is
fraught with difficulties. The issues raised by 10
mins in the quad at birmingham uni last week with a
noise-meter could probably provide enough material for a
'how to' methods paper. (NB, no ones's saying that this
would be an interesting paper. but it would be a paper
nevertheless, and I'm sure there was something in the
proposal about methods;)

Finally, now i have a mere 3 hours a day to kill on
the train i have been able to do some reading around the
new 'mobilities paradigm' and the associated field of
'mobile methodologies' within the social sciences.
I was initially excited by the possibilities of using
the project to explore nomadic ethics (a la Braidotti),
and the difference that moving makes to people's
experience of space. The literature I have read so
far has totally underwhelmed me, as it does the classic
geography trick of identifying yet another 'overlooked'
object of study (in this case, mobile communities) and
then applying all the same conceptual approaches to
them. nothing really new there from what i can
see.... and yes I am a whinging git... we'll read some
more and see whether it really does lead anywhere other
than the emporer's new clothes.

so there you have it my first ever blog. I have
crumbled and joined the blogging generation.
before you know it there'll be pictures and everything.

This is evans, blogging off.

Thursday, October 4

Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working
Out the Surprisingly Obvious (MISPWOSO)

In one of the Hitch Hikers' books Douglas Adams noted
the tendency among scientists to spend millions of
research money and time to prove stuff that everybody
already knew anyway. And it's a staple of the Today
Programme to have a chuckle at whatever the latest
madness is from some American research team.

Today I feel like I've done something to join these
proud ranks. Jane & I went out with a decibel meter and
recorded the noise levels at various points around
Eastside. By no means was this a comprehensive survey
(we'll doubtless have to spend several days filling in
the gaps), but it was enough to test the principle. The
idea was to create a contour map - like you might do for
hills, but shading it in according to noise levels
rather than height.

As part of the ArcGIS mapping software there's a tool
called Spatial Analyst which will create contours
automatically from point data - I used an Inverse
Distance Weighted model. Don't ask me what this means,
because I honestly don't know. But it produces some
pretty maps, like this one:
The pinker colours show higher noise levels. Shock
horror, the High Street and area around the bus mall by
Moor Street Station are noisier than wandering along the
canal. Bet you never saw that one coming. Will have to
go and survey all the cross streets along the southern
side of the railway tracks - Heath Mill Lane where we
walked is particularly noisy because of the buses, but
others won't be.

Still, I'm feeling happier now that we're doing some of
the fieldwork we told the ESRC we'd undertake.
Particularly happy that Jane is getting on with making
contacts. My head is back in teaching at the moment now
that the kids are back for a new term. Spent the last
few days writing a lecture about feminist research
epistemologies for the second years. I bet they'll be
as happy to hear about it as I was to write it. Still
this department has 8 female teaching staff compared to
48 men - somebody needs to say something about gender
inequalities and I guess it'll be me.

Much as I
love the office-based part of research (especially on a
rainy day like today!), it was a real treat to get out
yesterday and start meeting people! Two important
things came out of my foray into Eastside:

1) I managed to find my way
to a specific place! Don't laugh - lots of
geographers are very bad at this. Being a rural
geographer originally, I have no problem with good old
OS maps in remote countryside, but maps of urban areas
are often really hard to follow especially if you're on
foot. One-way streets and other things useful for
drivers aren't as important as whether you can get
through the end of a dead end street, where the foot
bridge is or where - exactly - you can cross the park.

2) I was reminded how easy it is
to slip into 'dualisms' - where something is either
'this' or 'that'. I visited two people yesterday -
one who works in and with the community and one who
works in one of the newer buildings in Eastside.
It's so tempting to think that these buildings, which
may have replaced historic, loved places are frequented
by people who couldn't care less, but, of course, this
is completely wrong. The person I visited is very
interested in, and takes care to support, local
businesses and services. She is as passionate
about the local community as the rest of us.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the equipment is
essential to have some kind of rigorous test of the
method. We did some more tests with the tablet - pretty
good reception around the part of Eastside around near
FoE where we did a test walk. Except, of course, for
the dratted viaducts. The new GPS seems a lot better at
picking up the signal and recalculating though, which
means the tracks don't wander as much after you emerge
from the other side.

We also did some tests on the radio mics. Hmm. I
pinned it to my flappy raincoat and all you can hear on
the recording is FLAP FLAP FLAP with my voice
indistinctly registering underneath. Hey ho, this is
why you do tests I suppose. We'll definitely need to
use the second mic to record Jane's prompts which means
we'll definitely need the dual channel recorder which,
you guessed it, hasn't turned up yet.

With Jane away for a couple of days I've been doing
teaching-related things. Joy to the world, good will to
freshers' etc.

Can I just say that
plenty of work is going on?!! As someone new to the
project, (and who didn't even know that much of this kit even
existed!) there has been a lot of reading and learning to do.
In case Phil is giving the impression that this is just a project
about playing with techno-toys, I have been catching up with the
literature about getting 'out there' to talk to people, the use of
computer technology 'in the 'field' and putting people back into
GIS. Hopefully, I can read something interesting soon....
(Didn't mean it, Phil!) Other things to follow up are about
the study area itself - hello to Digbeth and Deritend - and
community type studies. It's great to see that what we are
doing has hardly been touched on before.

You may gather that I like the people-based
stuff more, but I have to admit that walking round with the computer
and GPS thingy yesterday was very interesting, and I'm really
looking forward to going out and getting on with the real work of
walking and talking....

Finally, the laptop is here. This is a good thing for the filing
cabinet in my office, which received a few more dents on Friday in
my frustration at the computer salesman saying "it'll be with you
Friday" and being somewhat nonplussed when I pointed out that it was
already Friday. Ho hum.

It's not a massively exciting computer, but it can be taken out in
the rain without fizzling into uselessness, and this is the main
thing. Jane left me setting it up today and I spent a happy couple
of hours (yes, I really am that sad) fiddling with various disks
getting it to run ArcGIS, which is a piece of pretty hefty mapping
software that we're going to be using for some of the field mapping
and analysis.

We went out this afternoon for a quick test run. Again, I was
really impressed with the accuracy of the little GPS box we've got
which connects to the laptop via bluetooth. And Jane got the
excitement of watching the arrow move around the map as we walked.
Lucky Jane.

Jane's got a meeting set up with a friend of Cosmic (i.e. James, the
other researcher on this), who has done some cool photographic
projects on Eastside. All part of the process of getting into the
community networks down there. It finally starts to feel like we're
actually going to get somewhere with the project. Which,
inevitably, means that
something else will go horribly wrong now...

Still waiting for the computer to turn up. I won't name the
supplier, but they are messing us about. A lot. Yesterday I was
promised delivery today. Today I'm promised delivery tomorrow. We
gave them the cash over a week ago. Not impressed.

Plus all the other bits of kit we're trying to buy are stuck in an
in-tray in Finance and I've had to beg on bended knee a highly
stressed clerk to put them to the top of the pile for processing
tomorrow. She's being heroic over the whole thing, but I'm still
left without any of the stuff

Week three is almost over and we haven't even started yet. I could
cry. Most human geography doesn't really need any equipment and so
normally we're spared this kind of thing. I have much more sympathy
with the physical scientists now, pulling their (receding) hair out
over stuff not turning up, or breaking down, or simply going awol.
Whose stupid idea was it to do a gadget-laden project... oh, yeah,
right.

And with only
a minimum of swearing I've managed to get the project blog set up.
The idea of keeping such a blog came out of discussions in the
Public Geographies Working Group
over the last couple of years, where we talked about alternative
writing styles and alternative ways of publishing ('public
blographies', hmm). Let's face it, only about 8 people in the world
ever read your carefully crafted articles in the
Journal of Obscure Studies,
not least because they cost about £30 a time to download unless you
happen to work for an institution that pays for a subscription. Not
exactly opening up university research to the outside world.

So the blog
is here partly because of the philosophy of public geography, but
it's also here to act as a field diary. The Rescue Geography
project is basically experimental - we're trying out a variety of
new techniques for recording interviews in the field with people
walking around familiar spaces to tell their stories about those
spaces. Various researchers have done talking-and-walking
interviews before, but no one has really rigorously examined the
usefulness of the technique and what methods/equipment will produce
the best results.

We're now in
week three of the project, which gives some indication of how
disorganised I've been in terms of setting up this blog. I was
hoping to get the new 'public' website (i.e. one that isn't hosted
on the University's server) up and running by now, but I'm still
waiting for the new software I've ordered to turn up...

Which is one
of the main points of contention, in that for various
Finance-related reasons (far too tedious to go into here), we're
still waiting for almost all of the equipment to actually get here.
But we do have Jane here, which is great. She's going to be doing
most of the work and I'm feeling guilty that we can't yet get her
started on the fieldwork because none of the kit has arrived.

We have done
some equipment tests. Before the project started I was playing
around with an Itronix hardtablet PC, but the screen visibility is a
bit rubbish in daylight, the inbuilt GPS is a bit temperamental and,
frankly, it weighs more than the moon. Good if you want to hammer
in nails, not so great if you want to wander around with it for
extended periods. For the project we've decided to go with a
lightweight Panasonic Toughbook and a separate bluetooth GPS
device. Okay, this is where it gets incredibly geeky, this little
box is basically a ceramic aerial, a GPS decoder and a little radio
signal which connects it to a computer. It uses SiRFStar III
circuitry, which seems to be about as good as 'navigation grade' GPS
gets. Plus I like saying 'SiRFStar III' because it fills me with an
overwhelming sense of importance - yes, probably some kind of
masculinist discourse of technophilia.

The plan is
to animate the GPS tracks in ArcGIS - which is basically a piece of
commercial mapping software - and attach these animations to the
records of people speaking whilst walking. But we're still working
out quite how we're going to do this and the extent to which we'll
be using Google Earth and Google Maps to make these records publicly
available. This experimentation is kind of the point of this
project really.

I've had a
play at creating an animation,

using my bike
ride home as an example. It's a bit creepy watching the blob slow
down slightly as I've hit an uphill bit. Obviously this isn't real
time, but I don't think anyone needs to sit through 20 minutes of a
track moving very slowly across a map. I've been thinking,
actually, about getting cyclists to record their GPS tracks home,
whilst narrating the route - inspired by work that
Kye Askins,
Duncan Fuller
and others up at Northumbria Uni have been doing. But, like so many
of my good ideas, who knows if I'll actually get the time to do
anything about it.